The current study is a work in progress which wishes to explore the concepts and enactment of leadership and crisis management from the female leaders’ perspective since very few studies, if any, have explored whether inclusive leadership can help educational institutions when they must face unprecedented challenges in terms of crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. By adopting critical gender theory as my theoretical framework, I regard gender as socially constructed (Kolb, 2000) acknowledging that it is reproduced regularly in daily negotiation sustaining structured inequalities between men and women and leading to the existing gender discrimination in their employment status (Morley 2013) highlighting a favouritism towards men within the academy (Knights and Richards, 2003). Savigny (2014) reports that female educational leaders feel as the ‘other’ not belonging within the academy. This leads to marginalisation of women, their contributions, and ideas (Savigny 2014). Through assisted thematic analyses of 40 female educational leaders’ oral responses to questions regarding how they have led during the Covid-19 crisis, the current study investigated whether they relied on inclusive leadership to help their universities exit this unprecedented crisis during its first phase. The study revealed that these women exercised inclusive transformational leadership and provided considerable support to their followers during the Covid-19 crisis leading them through the crisis as well as managing the response.
During the second phase of the project, which is currently in progress, the researcher wishes to further explore female educational leaders’ response to the Covid-19 crisis after the pandemic applying an intersectional lens (looking at race and ethnicity) and examine the lessons learnt and the ways forward. This study will unveil the impact that the pandemic had on these female educational leaders’ leadership and crisis management skills. The aim of the researcher is to analyse the interviews of 40 more female educational leaders from the same HEI after the pandemic to compare these women’s perceived crisis management skills and reliance to inclusive leadership during the crisis and after it and identify ways in which female educational leaders can be supported after the pandemic. A new theoretical framework will be proposed to inform the design of training programmes which will hopefully provide guidance to women for future crises and train them to become more inclusive as leaders.
This study argues that implementing a gender inclusive lens in pandemic preparedness responses by taking into consideration the experiences and voices of female leaders is necessary. The overall aim is to promote diversity and inclusion in HEI in response to crises maximising employee performance while also fostering pandemic preparedness. Human resource development efforts should support female leadership development and creation of a proactive, crisis-prepared organizational culture (Elsubbaugh et al., 2004). The literature clearly indicates that leadership, in times of organizational crisis, is imperative to organizational survival (Borodzicz and van Haperen, 2002). However, female educational leaders, adept at handling normal issues, are sometimes not as skilled and well-prepared to handle crisis situations while supporting their followers. The study will provide recommendations for Higher Education Institutions, HR professionals, policy-makers, academic managers and senior leadership teams to support female educational leaders and foster diversity and inclusion.